Virtual Reality (VR) content provides an enhanced viewing and interactive experience for a user by conveying the feeling of being immersed within an environment. Most VR systems enhance the experience by providing the user with the ability to change the user's viewpoint within the content or with respect to various elements of the content, and the environment, characters, and objects within the content may be presented to have a three-dimensional (3D) effect. Recent advancements in VR, including smartphone based VR solutions, have increased the potential of VR implementations that are readily available to a large audience of consumers.
As the VR environment is fully immersive, it is important to present all aspects of the environment in the same perspective or 3D effect in order to maintain the user's perception of full immersion. When a user is observing a fully immersive environment, a difference in perspective for even one or a few objects may present a jarring experience for the user and the immersive illusion could be immediately destroyed. Therefore, all content presented in the VR environment must be rendered in the same perspective, which often requires content providers to perform full VR renderings of all content in order to reach a user in the VR presentation space.
For these reasons, it may be advantageous for content providers to be able to transition their existing 2D content to be presentable to users within the VR environment without creating a jarring experience for the user due to changes in user perspective, and without completely re-rendering the 2D content into a VR compatible format, which often requires substantial effort and cost. Thus, there is a great need for a solution to effectively present 2D content within a VR presentation environment while maintaining the VR immersion effect for a user.